The Final Frontiersman

by James Campbell

  French explorers in Canada called the endless herds of caribou, the world’s most efficient walkers, La Foule—“The Throng.” To see La Foule, as I had the previous summer, while camped on the Kongakut River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with my friend Burns, is to be awestruck—there are so many caribou that an entire slope looks as if it is undulating. As they near, a chorus of grunting and clicking hooves accompanies the dramatic choreography of their movements. The Gwich’in used to intercept these migrating herds, trapping the caribou inside fences, which were often miles long. Snares were set inside the fences, and when the caribou were corralled, they became entangled. Gwich’in hunters then finished them off with spears or bows and arrows.

  Much like the old Gwich’in hunters, who depended on the caribou for many of their needs, when the Korths shoot one almost nothing is wasted. They eat the meat and the organs. The tongue and cheeks, the meat on the face, the fat behind the eyes, the brain—these are delicacies. They also keep the head, which they will roast or use for headcheese. To make headcheese, Edna boils the head down to a thick broth, adds spices, onions, red peppers, and vinegar, and sets the broth outside to harden. By the following morning the soup has the consistency of soft, gelatinous cheese and will taste like, as Heimo describes it, “peppered jello.” Although the Korths primarily use high-tech sleeping bags now, they’ll make the hide, depending on its condition, into a blanket, for added warmth in winter. Edna uses the leg skins for kamiks, the sealskin-lined boots that she, Heimo, and the girls wear throughout winter; she boils the hoofs and bones for soup, and uses the leg bones and attached meat for stew. This leaves only the horns, which Heimo often sells to a Fairbanks horn buyer for $200 to $250.

  Mummuck Mountain has always been one of Heimo’s favorite caribou hunting areas. During the summer, the animals take refuge in the high elevations to avoid the constant menace of botflies, warble flies, and mosquitoes. Today Heimo hopes to kill only one caribou, but how many he takes for the year will be determined by whether or not he gets a moose. Legally, his family, including Krin and Rhonda, is allowed to take forty caribou a year, ten each. If Heimo gets a moose, they’ll take four or five caribou at the most. If he fails to shoot a moose, which is unlikely, they will take ten or twelve. This year, he plans to shoot only a bull caribou. While he was in Fort Yukon, Fran Mauer, a former Arctic National Wildlife Refuge biologist, came through town. In the course of their conversation, Mauer reported that there’d been a significant calf die-off, and Heimo is determined not to risk taking a cow of breeding age, which might drop a calf again next year.

  Though Heimo used to hunt with a large-bore rifle, a Marlin .444, which he brought up from Wisconsin, believing that it took a big gun to bring down a big animal, after his experience on St. Lawrence Island, he learned the art of bullet placement. He now uses a 22.250, a small rifle with excellent ballistics. He calls it the flattest shooting gun made. The added bonus is that it doesn’t blow a big hole in the animal, therefore little of the meat is ruined.

  After ten minutes or so, Heimo sets down his binoculars. “Old Crow Flats,” he says, directing my attention east. “It’s full of lakes and swarming with mosquitoes. The Indians who lived in that area used to be called the Rat Indians because they took so many muskrats off the lakes every spring. Over there,” he continues, motioning to the northeast, to a small creek that feeds the Coleen River, “that’s where I want my ashes scattered. Edna and the girls know that. It might sound corny, but this land has given so much to me, when I die, I’d like to give something back.”

  Heimo leans back and closes his eyes. I close my eyes, too, and doze off. I wake up to the sound of his voice. “I’d be disheartened-would that be the word?—not to see caribou here because of oil. They can’t tell me that oil development in ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] won’t affect the herd. That’s a bunch of lies. I’d be sad to see that disrupted. I know what it can look like. This whole valley can fill up with caribou. Take away the caribou and you lose something. I don’t want ANWR to be like the North Slope.”

  What Heimo is talking about are the drill pads, drilling rigs ten stories high, hundreds of miles of service roads, flow stations, pipelines, reserve pits holding millions of tons of drilling waste, with high concentrations of heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and other toxic chemicals, smokestacks, parking lots, and workers’ barracks that characterize the North Slope oil development area.

  Proponents of development (including the state of Alaska, oil’s biggest promoter) argue that the disputed 1002 area (referred to as “ten-oh-two”), a 1.5 million-acre chunk of Arctic coastal plain, was exempted from refuge status for precisely this reason—to allow for the possibility that oil could one day be extracted.

  In the early spring of 1989, it almost was. President George Bush the elder was prepared to sign the bill giving the go-ahead. Then, on March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil, leaving an oil slick that deluged 1,200 miles of beaches, effectively smothering the hopes of those who wanted to get at the coastal plain’s oil deposits.

  While the 1002 area was indeed placed in a special category by ANILCA, the legislation specified that the area’s oil and gas potential would have to be weighed against the impact of development on the environment. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has determined that oil drilling would be incompatible with the purposes of the refuge. Big oil’s boosters, however, hope to waive provisions in the National Wildlife Refuge Administration Act and National Enviromental Policy Act in order to circumvent this clause and allow drilling.

  The rallying cry of the energy policy of the current Bush is that the U.S. needs to tap coastal plain oil reserves in order to relieve our dependency on foreign oil and to solve the accompanying national security issues. What’s often neglected in this argument is that the oil contained in the coastal plain amounts to a mere drop in the bucket when measured against the United States’s monumental needs, which are now at 19 million barrels a day, or 6.9 billion barrels a year. Christopher Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute likens trying to stem our reliance on Middle East oil with coastal plain production to “trying to stop a major fire with a teacup.”

  U.S. Geological Survey estimates of the coastal plain’s oil production potential were first spelled out in a report submitted to Congress by the Department of Interior in 1987 called ANWR: Alaska, Coastal Plain Resource Assessment. Based on a $33 per barrel standard, this document established a mean estimate of 3.2 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil. In other words, the coastal plain would meet the United States’s energy needs for less than six months. Over a 25-year field life, it would produce an average of 351,000 barrels of oil per day, amounting to less than 2 percent of our 19 million barrel-per-day domestic consumption requirements. USGS updates of those estimates in 1998 and 2001 did not materially change the mean estimate. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, improving automobile fuel efficiency by just three miles per gallon would save one million barrels per day. At that rate, in less than ten years, we would save more oil than would likely be pumped from the Arctic Refuge. And the oil savings would continue long after that.

  What’s also overlooked in the argument to develop coastal plain oil resources is the time involved in getting that oil to market. Terry Koonce president of exploration and production for ExxonMobil, estimates that, based on the usual three-to-four-year permitting process, it will take ten years to get the oil into the existing Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

  Opponents of drilling maintain that because the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is only one-tenth the size of the coastal plain in the central Arctic (the site of Prudhoe Bay), there would not be sufficient space to accommodate the foraging and calving of the 126,000 Porcupine caribou herd. Unable to seek relief in the coastal waters from the insects that plague them, the caribou would be driven into the Brooks Range, where they would encounter high predation risks. In addition, after su
rviving the winter on “caribou moss”—little more than lichens—they would be deprived of the protein-rich cotton grass of the coastal plain, an environment that Fran Mauer, former refuge biologist, calls “the best place in the world for raising calves.” Although the caribou have become the environmental symbol, the cause célèbre, in the battle to save the refuge, the lives of many more animals are at stake: polar bears, hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, musk-oxen, wolves, moose, wolverine, Arctic fox, and Dall sheep.

  Despite the claims of the oil industry and many of Alaska’s politicians that its impact would be localized, a mere “footprint” on the land, the U.S. Geological Survey says that oil on the coastal plain is scattered into many separate pools. In other words, the effects of development realistically could not be contained even with revolutionary technology such as directional drilling. Drilling rigs would be spread across the land.

  The National Petroleum Reserve Area (NPRA), an environmentally sensitive area lying just west of the current North Slope oil fields, is the industry’s newest target. “They’re making a real run at getting all of it,” says Allen Smith, Alaska senior policy analyst at the Wilderness Society. “Not only are they pressing for oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, they plan to lease more land in the NPRA in the next couple of years than they’ve leased in all of Alaska in the last fifty years. It is a scandalous giveaway of America’s Arctic that will needlessly sacrifice millions of acres of our natural heritage.”

  Bear Mountain lies directly north of Mummuck Mountain, where Heimo and I have been sitting, glassing, and talking for the last hour. The original 8.9-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Range was established in 1960, under the Eisenhower administration, to preserve the unique wildlife, wilderness, and recreation values of this area, and Bear Mountain was its southern border. “Thank heavens, this is a refuge,” Heimo says, standing up, his arms outstretched as if he is greeting God. “If the BLM or the state owned this, there’d be roads and mines, you name it. Look at the Red Dog Mine,” he says, referring to the world’s largest supplier of zinc and its most northerly mine, which lies just west-northwest of here, outside the Noatak National Preserve, one of the earth’s largest watersheds. “Look at all the problems they’re having. Rick [a friend from Fairbanks] accuses me of being a NIMBY—not in my backyard. It’s not true, but even if it was, you gotta remember—my backyard is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, nineteen and a half million acres.”

  Heimo grabs his backpack and his gun and bounds away. Though earlier he was discouraged that we hadn’t seen any caribou, he is in good spirits now, even if there are no caribou. We’re walking, covering country again. “They’re going to come,” he says. “That’s almost for sure. I just hope you get to see it before you go back home.”

  We dip down into a creek bed, and Heimo lies on his stomach and slurps the water right out of the stream. Then he cups his hands and splashes it onto his face. “God, that feels great,” he says. “Go ahead,” he says, seeing me hesitate at the lip of the creek. “Dunk it. It ain’t that …” Before he can finish his sentence, I plunge my head into the water. Two seconds later, I come up screaming bloody murder. It feels like someone has taken a chisel to my temples.

  “Damn cold, huh?” Heimo laughs.

  We ascend another hill and Heimo is glassing west now in the direction of the Sheenjek River valley. Minutes later, he lowers his binoculars as a trans-Arctic jet rumbles high overhead. “Are you bothered by that?” I ask.

  “Heck,” Heimo answers, skipping down a steep slope like the Dall sheep he loves. “Those I can take. Besides, sometimes it’s just good to know that the world is still going.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Fall

  “Tell us everything,” Edna says. It is mid-September, and she, Heimo, and Krin are sitting outdoors around the fire at the Korths’ cabin on the upper Coleen River. They have been waiting for me. Because the pilot encountered headwinds on the way up, I am quite late. Edna says she should go in and prepare dinner—moose tongue, onions, and potatoes— but all she wants to do now is hear about Rhonda. “Dinner can wait. How is Poop?” she asks.

  Only then does it dawn on me that Rhonda is not here. In August I’d escorted her to Wisconsin and she stayed with my family and me for five days, but when I arrived on the river I expected to see her. In fact I almost asked where she was. There was Krin, lying in the hammock, reading a John Grisham novel and cuddling Firth. But where was Rhonda? Hauling water?

  I haven’t seen Rhonda for six weeks, but we talk regularly by phone, so I fill them in.

  “So she’s doing well?” Heimo asks when I finish.

  “She seems to be,” I say. “Oh, she’s homesick, but I think she’s enjoying herself. She can’t stand all the noise, though. Even in our little town, she complained about it. She’s made some good friends at school, and she likes her classes. She’s even joined the choir and is talking about trying out for a play.”

  I look at Krin, and she is beaming. Heimo notices it, too. “Krinny,” he says, “if Rhonda does well, and Tom can take it, then you get to go when Rhonda’s all done.”

  Edna gets up smiling, pleased with my report, and walks to the cabin. Heimo goes to the cabin to get the satellite phone so he can check to see if they’ve received any e-mail messages, and rather than sit with me, Krin dashes off into the woods like a child of nature, followed by Firth.

  Heimo joins me at the fire and punches a series of numbers on the phone. Two minutes later, he yells out, “Got a message.” Edna runs from the cabin and Krin bursts out of the woods, and they both crowd around him. It’s a short message from Rhonda. Heimo reads it out loud. Rhonda tells them that she has a cold, but other than that, she says, she’s happy, doing well, singing her heart out.

  Heimo turns off the phone and returns it to its protective case. “Why were you so eager to hear about Rhonda from me if she sends e-mails all the time?” I ask.

  “E-mails aren’t the same,” Heimo says. “They only allow you a hundred twenty characters per message, though sometimes Rhonda will send two or three of them back-to-back. Besides, I think it was a comfort to Edna.”

  The satellite phone is a relatively new addition. However, calls are so expensive—$1.50 a minute for the Korths to call out, $6.00 a minute for Rhonda to call them—that Heimo and Edna plan to use it only as a last resort or in the case of an emergency, and every once in a while to call Rhonda, so that they can hear her voice. The most immediate benefit is that the phone allows the Korths to get e-mail messages from Rhonda, more personal messages than she’d be willing to leave on Trapline Chatter, and certainly a lot faster than regular mail, which one friend or another will fly out once every three months or so.

  “Breakfast,” Krin calls from outside the Arctic oven. I unzip the tent and then the rain fly and poke my head out. Krin doesn’t dash off for the cabin. She stands there smiling, with Firth nuzzling her legs.

  “Krin,” I say, “you sound so pleasant this morning.”

  “Quit sleeping,” she says stridently, “and come out here.”

  I have been reading and am already dressed, so I slip on my hiking boots and am out in less than a minute.

  “You sure are slow,” she says. “Bet I could climb that tree faster than you.” She points to a large white spruce without any low hanging branches. Though I’ve always been proud of my climbing skills, I assess the tree and realize that it would be a difficult shinny, so I decline her challenge. Besides, I know better than to try to compete with Krin. She’s a veritable Jane. In spring, I saw her work her way up a tree that I’d declared unclimbable.

  “Chicken,” she says, taunting me.

  “No,” I reply. “Just old.”

  “You’re not so old,” she says. “When I’m your age, I bet I’ll be able to climb it. And by the way, while you were sleeping or reading or whatever, I was out hunting.” Krin points to the meat rack from which two spruce grouse are hanging. “I shot them so you
won’t starve.” At that she sprints for the cabin and ducks in through the door. Seconds later, I hear her yell, “Breakfast!”

  Inside, Heimo is sharpening his knife and Edna is spooning the oatmeal that Heimo has made into four large bowls. KZPA, 900 AM out of Fort Yukon, is playing country music again. “God,” Heimo says, looking up from his knife. “I get sick of country all the time.”

  I sit down on a bucket. “The honey is down there,” Edna says, handing me a bowl and gesturing toward the table. “And the cinnamon is right here. I know you like cinnamon.”

  Edna gives Krin her bowl, and Krin sets it on her sleeping cot while she sorts through her box from the Gateway Correspondence School, which the bush pilot brought in when he dropped me off. The books in the box catch my eye. I set my oatmeal at my feet and ask her if I can look at them. Krin’s required reading for the year is Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremaine, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  “Of course, you already know this one by heart,” I say, paging through Doyle’s classic. Returning it to her, I repeat Holmes’s line in my most ominous voice: “In those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted …”

  “I wish Poop was here,” Edna says, taking a bite of her oatmeal.

  “So do I,” Krin agrees.

  It occurs to me again—Rhonda is gone—and for a moment the cabin seems empty. Looking around, I spot a photograph I took of Rhonda and Krin in the spring. It hangs above Heimo and Edna’s bed, push-pinned to one of the wall logs.

  How dramatically Rhonda’s world has changed in three short months. She is living in Appleton, Wisconsin, a city of 70,000, and attending the same high school Heimo went to, though the city and the school have grown considerably since Heimo was a young man. The transition, I know, has been hard for her, but she’s been optimistic about it, excited about the possibilities. For Edna, left up here to imagine her daughter’s life in a place she’s only visited once, it is occasionally heartbreaking. Sometimes she checks for e-mail messages from Rhonda two and three times a day, depleting the phone’s battery. Of course, she worries about Rhonda. Is she happy? Is she making friends? Is she doing well in school? It hurts to have Rhonda so far away, but Edna knows the alternative is worse. If she had not gone to Wisconsin, who would have supervised her homeschooling? At sixteen, Rhonda is now doing advanced algebra, writing difficult essays, and neither Heimo nor Edna can help her anymore.